Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Serbs Continuing Former Yugoslavia’s Wars in Eastern Ukraine

Paul
Goble

Staunton, July 22 – Many in the West
feared that the disintegration of the USSR would lead to a “Yugoslavia with
nukes.” Their fears were misplaced, but in a disturbing echo, the former
Yugoslavia’s wars and their horrors are indeed continuing within the borders of
the former Soviet space where Serbs are still fighting “their war with the
Croatians.”

Olga, a Ukrainian woman who recently
fled from the occupied Ukrainian city of Gorlovka, provided details about the
involvement of Serbians in pro-Moscow forces in the Donbas to Kseniya Kirillova
who wrote them up for Radio Liberty’s Ukrainian Service (radiosvoboda.org/content/article/27141492.html).

According to the former Maidan
activist, Serbian fights are well integrated into the pro-Russian forces which
also include Chechens and ethnic Russians and which currently dominate the city
and carry out repressions against those in the local population who refuse to
go along with the new order.

“The majority of Serbs,” she
reports, “are involved mainly in the arrests of suspects and also tortures and
shooting, while the interrogations of those detailed are conducted by
investigators of the Russian FSB.”In
general, she says, “the Serbs are involved in ‘counter-intelligence,’ which
carries out a struggle with the so-called ‘agents’ of ‘the Right Sector.’”

Most Serbs, Olga continues, “do not
even speak Russian; and therefore, they are involved primarily with the arrests
of suspects, their delivery, and also with tortures and shootings.” The
pro-Kadyrov Chechens in contrast are used for patrols and “when it is necessary
to frighten the population.”

“Those of the Serbs who speak
Russian,” she says, “declared that they are continuing the war [in Ukraine]
which they had conducted earlier in Croatia.”

Overseeing
this mixed force initially and reportedly again in a recent times is a Russian
lieutenant colonel, Igor Bezler, known as “the devil.”Using intimidation, he took over the local
administration, ousting anyone who opposed him and launching a campaign of
terror against the population including murders and a minimum of 600 “disappearances.”

Olga
says that initially, she observed that “not more than 15 percent of the
population of the city” supported the pro-Moscow militants. Five percent were “active
supporters of a unified Ukraine, but “the rest of the population was ready to
accept any outcome.”The Bezler
international force blocked elections, although some local people voted anyway.

After Besler went to
Russian-occupied Crimea in the fall of 2014, power in the city changed “literally
every two or three months,” Olga continues, but now there are rumors that
Bezler is backand even has been talking
about creating a Gorlovka Peoples Republic which he would presumably head.

His international militants “have
begun to blow up railroads, bridges, and reservoirs and have threatened not
only the destruction of the entire infrastructure of the city but also the
complete destruction of the place together with its residents,” the Ukrainian
woman says, adding that these threats need to be taken seriously.

On the one hand, there is evidence
of widespread mining not only in Gorlovka but in other cities in the
Russian-occupied areas of eastern Ukraine. And on the other, there is a
chemical factory in the city whose destruction could cause consequences that
might be “worse than Chernobyl,” Olga says.

Neither Olga nor Kirillova, her
interviewer, mention what role the Serbs and Chechens might have in such an
operation.But it is not beyond the
realm of the possible that fighters from these two groups, given their own
earlier combat experiences, might be even more willing to engage in such a
terrorist operation than some of their Russian commanders.

Moreover, those very commanders and
their bosses locally and in Moscow would be only too pleased to be in a
position to deflect criticism and muddy the waters about any reports about such
things by pointing to the Serbs and the Chechens rather than the Russians as
the groups behind them.

Moscow has been successful in many
quarters in shifting the blame for such crimes, and it seems certain that the
Russian propaganda machine would likely gain acceptance among some in both
Russia and the West for such claims in the future.Thus, two earlier wars – the Chechen and the
Yugoslav – are casting a dark shadow on Russia’s war in Ukraine.